Josh Hutcherson Opens Up About Nearly Being Cast As Spider-Man
However, there was a silver lining in not getting the part.
There was a time when Josh Hutcherson would have swung his way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The actor has confirmed that he was being considered to play Spider-Man, and although he was crushed to be passed over for the iconic role, he pointed out the unexpected way that not being cast may have actually been a blessing in disguise.
Hutcherson opened up about his brush with superhero-dom during his Dec. 8 appearance on the Dinner’s on Me podcast. “A few months before I got cast in Hunger Games, I was in the running to be Spider-Man,” Hutcherson said, referring to 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Andrew Garfield ended up getting the web-slinging role over him. “I got told ‘no’ which, as a teenager, was heartbreaking because I obviously wanted to be Spider-Man.”
Despite feeling low at the time, Hutcherson was quickly cheered up by another huge franchise part the he couldn’t have accepted if he had played Spider-Man. “But then, I was cast in The Hunger Games. That was the craziest turn of events,” the actor said. “Hunger Games came out of nowhere. It just changed everything.”
Hutcherson has previously spoken about how much passion he had for Spider-Man during the audition process. “I was a big Spider-Man fan all my life growing up from the old-school cartoons and stuff,” he told Inverse in 2024. He was particularly frustrated that he was never told why he wasn’t cast. “You never find out. They just end up hiring somebody else. So, I never found out why.”
Around that same time, Hutcherson told Wired that he enlisted help from his former stunt double to help him train for the action scenes. “He and I went down to this stunt training gym,” Hutcherson said. “We decided to shoot me doing some Spider-Man stunts, but I didn’t get it.”
Elsewhere in his new Dinner’s on Me interview, Hutcherson implied the failed Spider-Man audition was a rare early taste of rejection in his career, which he wouldn’t fully experience again until after finishing The Hunger Games. “It was just like a string of no one calling, not getting any offers, auditioning but not getting cast,” Hutcherson said of his post-Hunger Games years. “It’s this whole thing of, ‘Oh wow, I have my career that I’ve had since I was 9 years old. It’s always worked. I always got cast.’ Of course, there are things that you don’t get cast in, but I had only known that the chances are, if I was auditioning, was going to book it. That is just not the reality at all.”
